13 KiB
Executable file
13 KiB
Executable file
The big list of women who did things
Unfinished, obviously.
Last updated: 2024-06-27
Art
- Aphra Behn: one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing
- Tina Bell: pioneer of the "grunge" music genre, before Nirvana
- Lisa Ben: created Vice Versa, the first known lesbian publication in North America
- Diemoth: 12th-century recluse who transcribed at least forty-five manuscripts; notable for her "beautiful handwriting"
- Enheduanna: first known poet
- Marie de France: earliest known French woman poet
- Herrad of Landsberg: 12th-century nun who wrote an early pictoral encyclopedia, Hortus deliciarum, to teach the women in her convent about the sciences of the time
- Hrotsvitha: first female writer (from German-speaking lands) and first female historian
- Baya Mahieddine: surrealist artist whose work was imitated by Picasso
- Edna St. Vincent Millay: first woman (and second person!) to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
- Lucy Terry Prince: author of Bars Fight, the oldest known work of literature by an African American
- Lotte Reiniger: director/writer of the oldest surviving animated feature film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed
- Mary Shelley: novelist and pioneer of the science fiction genre of books
- Murasaki Shikibu: wrote the first novel, The Tale of Genji
- Pamela Colman Smith: illustrator of the iconic Rider-Waite tarot deck
- Valerie Thomas: invented the illusion transmitter, critical for the invention of 3D movies
- Maud Wagner: first female tattoo artist in the USA
Computers
- Ada Lovelace: the first computer programmer
- Kathleen Booth: inventor of assembly language
- Evelyn Berezin: designed the first computer word proecssor
- Edith Clarke: first woman to earn a degree in electrical engineering
- Marian Croak: invented VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)
- Judith Estrin: instrumental in the invention of TCP
- Margaret Hamilton: lead programmer on the Apollo project
- Grace Hopper: created the first compiler for a programming language
- Susan Kare: "pioneer of pixel art"; designed many of the icons, fonts, and images for Apple, NeXT, and IBM in the 1980s
- Hedy Lamarr: invented Wi-Fi
- Ruth Teitelbaum: one of the six women who programmed ENIAC
- Gladys West: mathematician who developed the satellite geodesy models eventually developed into the Global Positioning System (GPS)
Industry
- Tabitha Babbitt: invented the circular saw
- Katharine Burr Blodgett: invented non-reflective (invisible) glass
- Sarah Boone: invented the modern ironing board
- Josephine Cochrane: invented first commercially successful dishwasher
- Bette Nesmith Graham: invented Liquid Paper
- Margaret Knight: invented the paper bag machine
- Stephanie Kwolek: invented Kevlar
- Alice H. Parker: invented central heating
Medicine
- June Almeida: discovered the coronavirus group of viruses
- Leila Denmark: synthesised the first vaccine for pertussis (whooping cough)
- Gertrude Elion: biochemist and Nobel Prize winner instrumental in the creation of the first antiviral drug widely used to fight AIDS
- Rosalind Franklin: discovered the double-helix formation of DNA
- Mary-Claire King: discovered the BRCA1 gene and its role in causing breast cancer
- Barbara McClintock: discovered that genes can move between chromosomes
- Rita Levi-Montalcini: discovered nerve growth factor
- Andromachi Papanikolaou: key factor in the development of the pap smear test
- Candace Pert: discovered the opiate receptor in the brain
- Susan La Flesche Picotte: the first Indigenous woman to earn a medical degree
- Mildred Catherine Rebstock: first person to synthesise chloromycetin (an antibiotic)
- Trota of Salerno: first gynecologist
- Nettie Stevens: discovered that chromosomes determine sex
- Flossie Wong-Staal: proved that HIV causes AIDS
Science
- Patricia Bath: inventor of the Laserphaco Probe
- Ethel Bauer: planned lunar trajectories for the Apollo program, critical to 13's safe return
- Katie Bouman: led the development of the algorithm that took the first image of a black hole
- Jocelyn Bell Burnell: discovered first pulsar
- Annie Jump Cannon: developed the first stellar classification system; classified almost 400,000 stars
- Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: discovered what stars are made out of
- Sophie Germain: French mathematician and pioneer of elasticity theory
- Fanny Hesse: critical in the invention of the Petri dish by suggesting to use agar instead of gelatin
- Hypatia: first female mathematician whose life is "reasonably well recorded"
- Mary Jackson: NASA's first Black female engineer
- Mae Jemison: first Black woman in space
- Katherine Johnson: mathematician crucial for the success of the first USA spaceflights
- Mary Kenner: inventor of the menstrual pad; holder of the record for the most patents awarded to a Black woman in the USA
- Inge Lehmann: discovered the Earth has a solid inner core
- Lise Meitner: discovered nuclear fission
- Maria Sibylla Merian: one of the first naturalists to observe insects directly
- Mary Sherman Morgan: invented hydyne (a liquid rocket fuel)
- Emmy Noether: mathematician; discovered her namesake First and Second Theorems (fundamental in mathematical physics)
- Cecilia Payne: discovered what the universe and sun are made of
- Clarice Phelps: part of the team that discovered element 117 (tennessine); first Black woman involved with the discovery of a chemical element
- Vera Rubin: discovered dark matter
- Seondeok of Silla: set up first astronomy tower in Asia
- Donna Strickland: winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for the practical implementation of chirped pulse amplification
- Judy Sullivan: biomedical engineer for the Apollo 11 spaceflight
- Maria Telkes: co-built first solar-power-heated heated home with Eleanor Raymond
- Marie Tharp: mapped the floor of the Atlantic Ocean; proved the theory of continential drift
- Chien-Shiung Wu: first woman to become president of the American Physical Society; worked on the Manhattan Project and proved that parity is not conserved
- Maryna Viazovska: solved the sphere packing problem in dimensions 8 and 24
- ...and many more
Social Change
- Claudette Colvin: pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement; refused to give up her bus seat nine months before Rosa Parks did
- Ruth Ellis: LGBT rights activist; oldest known surviving open lesbian
- Barbara Gittings: "mother of the gay rights movement"; part of the movement to get the APA to drop homosexuality as a mental illness
- Temple Grandin: one of the first public figures to publically come out as Autistic; animal welfare activist that campaigned for humane treatment of cattle in beef processing plants
- Maura Healey: first open lesbian elected attorney general of a USA state, one of the first LGBT governors of a USA state, and first woman elected governor of the state of Massachusetts
- Judith Heumann: held the longest sit-in in a government building for the enactment of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (civil rights protection for disabled people)
- Qiu Jin: Chinese revolutionary, poet, and early feminist
- Elizabeth Peratrovich: instrumental in the passing of the USA's first anti-discrimination law
- Hannah Szenes: poet and volunteer parachutist who helped evacuate Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust
- Grunya Sukhareva: child psychiatrist; first to publish a detailed description of autistic symptoms
Misc
- Marie Van Brittan Brown: co-invented home security surveillance
- Bessie Coleman: first Black woman to earn an international pilot's license; first known female aviator
- Martha Gellhorn: journalist and WWII war correspondent; pretended to be a nurse to be the only woman at Normandy on D-Day
- Helen Lewis: journalist and namesake of "Lewis' Law": "the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism"
- Elizabeth Magie: created the progenitor to the Monopoly board game
- Rose Valland: captain in the French military during WWII; saved thousands of works of art from being stolen by the Nazis
- Madam C. J. Walker: entrepreneur and first female self-made millionaire in the USA